Matthew Compeau and Biying Miao are architects and entrepreneurs who use The Replicator to bring their designs to life, including the fantastic jewelry from their latest project Hot Pop Factory. We asked them why they use a MakerBot, and they whipped up a post for us to share right here on this blog.

Hot Pop Factory’s collection of 3D Printed jewelry celebrates the unique texture of 3D Printed objects. The three-piece collection was designed using Rhino3D and Grasshopper and then fabricated with our MakerBot Replicator. Coming from an architectural background – a profession in which the tools and technology for dreaming up amazing designs are progressing much faster than the budgets and construction methods needed to build them, we realized that our MakerBot provided an amazing creative outlet to scale down those ideas and bring them to life in way that wouldn’t be possible with other fabrication methods.

Since it first started shipping earlier this year, we’ve been using the Replicator non-stop. After several months of experimenting with its strengths and limitations, we’ve been able to develop a set of striking designs that show off the stratified beauty inherent to the additive manufacturing process. During this time, The Replicator completely changed the way we design. Instead of iterating our designs through sketches and rough models, The Replicator lets us produce an unlimited number of full-size prototypes that we can touch and wear at every stage of the design process. The result was a visceral understanding of how each piece is formed that allowed us to tweak every detail in order to help bring out their true beauty.

As excited as we were about The Replicator as a design tool, we are equally passionate about its role in the future of personal manufacturing. As young designers we don’t have the resources that would normally be required to bring a product like this to market. Our MakerBot has empowered us to take full ownership of the design and manufacturing process. Instead of investing tens of thousands of dollars and trying to forge relationships with suppliers and fabrications, we can manage the entire process — from design, to fabrication, to distribution — from our living room. It’s an exhilarating feeling to have so much control over a project we’re so passionate about. We hope that as our business grows, we can empower others in the same way, by providing tools that allow them to personalize each piece for custom manufacturing.

Needless to say, working on this project has already been an exciting journey. We hope that you’ll join us as the experience continues to unfold at www.HotPopFactory.com.

Furniture and architecture elements are common subjects in many miniature genres.  This week we’ll learn about how to use common sizes to create cohesiveness in a scale model, and consider how these rules change when working on a playset.  Measurements of real objects are great source material for modeling, but if you’re working off of photographs, or designing something from scratch, it’s helpful to know typical measurements of a variety of common objects.

Common Sizes

Width and depth vary, but the height of common furniture pieces is fairly constant.  Online catalogs are a great source for photos that are accompanied by dimensions.

Building code and human proportions have changed over the centuries.  Common architectural dimensions like door width and railing height are typically wider and higher in modern buildings than in older architecture.

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I’m taking a short break from the blog series this week, but I didn’t want to leave you hanging.  I’ve put together a short screencast on how I use the creation tools in 123D Catch, specifically reference points and reference distances, to create scans that print in my desired scale.  This tip is great for anyone who wants tight control over print size, whether you’re working in scale or not.

A Quick Note: I’m running Autodesk 123D Catch on my mac through VMware Fusion.  Autodesk just released a web version, which is great for mac users, but it lacks some of the advanced features like creation tools.  So to use this tip, you need to use the desktop application on Windows.

This is the second entry in a series of posts discussing MakerBot & Miniatures.  Check out last week’s post!

My journey to 3D modeling started at a drafting board and most of my CAD work still ends up in two dimensions on a piece of paper as a plan, section or elevation.  As many of the things I model in CAD are much larger than a piece of paper, it is common practice to create full scale geometry in a CAD program, and then choose a scale in which to depict the project in a layout. When I sat down to design my first model for 3D printing, I wasn’t sure how to get started.  Should I continue to create in full scale, and then scale down when I wanted to make it with my MakerBot?  Or should I design directly in scale?  I currently use both methods in my work, and today I’ll talk through the pros and cons of each approach.

I already had a workflow to go from CAD to 2D, but how would 3D printing change that?

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Earlier this week, I appeared on MakerBot TV to chat with Annelise about how I use my MakerBot in my work. As a part of my job as a scenic designer, I create scale models of theatre sets.  Are you curious about how you might put a MakerBot to work on your scale project?  Want to hop on the playsets bandwagon? I’ve put together a short blog series about getting started working in scale.

This week, we’ll learn about scale factors and use a bit of miniature math to consider what scale to work in.  Stay tuned for more in coming weeks! Read the rest of this entry »

Sometime last holiday season I passed through Union Square.  There were Christmas trees being bought, sold and sawed and I bent down to pick up a scrap.  Being that I stare at glowing rectangles most hours of the day, I wanted to feel its texture and smell its sap.  It fit nicely in my pocket, too, so I took it along.

As I walked along 10^th Avenue, I reached into my jacket pocket, by now full of dirt and sap, took out the wood and held it to my ear.  “Hello?” I said.  I kept talking into my piece of Christmas tree as passersby shot perplexed stares my way.

I’m Bobby Genalo, a graduate student at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. As part of my thesis, MakerBot has given me access to its resources and community for a project called Artphones, a platform for transforming anything into a working cell phone.  The conversation I’m looking to have, however, has less to do with the realities of crafting one’s own phone, and more about something I’ve been calling the malleability of life.

I see life as an impermanent and iterative experience, where each project is birthed from the one before it.  I want to celebrate risk, promote jaywalking instead of using the crosswalk*, and end each conversation with “and then?”  What if a school were to take this approach?  It’s my thinking that we might get students who not only are prepared for the future, but who see their world as a playground of opportunities right now.

Earlier this month, I got the chance to demo this dream with a 3rd grade class at The Packer Collegiate Institute here in Brooklyn.  I had made arrangements with their teacher, Maureen Reilly (who also teaches LEGO Robotics), to discuss the Artphone with her 20 students and begin exploring their ideas for custom walkie-talkies (3rd graders are too young for cell phones).

I introduced the idea with a book that most in attendance were familiar with: “The Giving Tree.”  I explained that I had photographed tree stumps around Brooklyn, the evidence of a large storm that passed through the Northeast last year.  Having recently read the book with my niece, I was inspired to prove that, with a little technical know-how, a stump needn’t be the end of a tree’s life.  I showed how I created a mesh of a stump using 123D Catch, cleaned it up in a 3D modeling program, and printed it out using MakerBot’s Replicator.  Eyes were wide.  The children took quickly to sketching their walkie-talkies and await my return for when they will sculpt their designs with clay (March 26).

Concurrently, I have begun asking certain adults (with existing carrier plans and SIM cards) to explore, tangibly, their ideal mobile phone.  The hardware for these phones, as I’ve told my first users, will be screen-less and internet-less.  It’s my hope that designing a cell phone without the constraint of a bulky screen will, formally, emphasize ergonomic factors, conceptually free them from a reliance on constant information and, mechanically, be far easier for users to dissect.

I’m working on the Artphone in the hopes of inspiring a transference of responsibility from the producer to the consumer.  How can we spark a curiosity about the “hows” and “whys” of our everyday tools that motivates people to create?  Can we shift the dialogue about cell phones so that, at the end of its life, it can be celebrated like a child’s drawing on the fridge or a diploma on the wall?

And then?

More of Bobby’s thoughts and work can be seen at www.genalodesigns.com/blog

*For reasons that aren’t obvious, it’s been demonstrated that jaywalking is in fact safer than crossing legally. Read more in the book Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt.